On Thu, Oct 15, 1998 at 04:31:55PM -0400, Ken Manheimer wrote: | A while back i implemented a mailman feature to facilitate having | "umbrella" lists to which other lists could be subscribed. I would | like to change it slightly, and want to see if i'd be messing anybody | up with the change. I'm not even sure if anybody but me uses the | feature, so first i'll explain what it's about, and then i'll explain | the problem. | | The idea is to enable maillists that are composed of only other | maillists, as "subscribers". That way, announcements of interest to | groups of lists could be sent to the encompassing list. This may | sound peculiar, but it actually makes sense in the context of, for | example, activities that have regional groups doing their regional | thing, but also occasionally collecting together for, eg, national | conclaves, or for discussions of common issues across the regions, | etc. (In fact, i'm establishing a network of lists for people who do | something i'm part of, contact improvisation, and this arrangement | looks really pretty good for us.)

neat!

| The only special provision i had to make for this arrangment is an | admin setting so that the members administrative stuff, like the | monthly password reminders, are _not_ posted to the subscribed lists, | but to their administrators. I created the 'reminders_to_admins' | option, and set it so that the reminders would go to the | 'list-admin@host.domain' account, rather than 'list@host.domain'. | (I'm pretty sure this was pre 1.0b4, so it's been there for a while, | probably unnoticed by most people.) | | The problem is that it may be that '-owner' is a more prevalent suffix | for list administrator addresses than '-admin'. At least, that's what | makelist.com seems to use, and from my probing they don't seem to | support the '-admin' alias, while the policy for mailman is to support | both. So i'm considering changing the option to go to '-owner' | address instead of '-admin', but before i do that i wanted to find out | whether (1) anyone already depends on the '-admin' option, and (2) | whether anyone has objections to making the switch, in any case.

there are probably still lots of mailman lists out there that didn't get installed with the -owner address. it might be a good idea to make note of this come next release.

| (We could add *another* option to designate the suffix, but that | doesn't strike me as a good solution - we'd be better off striving for | some standard, than encouraging fragmentation here. What good would | one choice or another be if some of the subscriber lists within the | umbrella have one and some have the other?)

hmmm. it seems to me that -owner is probably a standard enough suffix to use for this. Even if it weren't available for a particular list, it seems likely that any organization grouping lists together like this would have the administrative pull to get a -owner forwarding address set up for such an enterprise.

| Any clear feelings, one way or the other, from anyone? I plan on | making the change within the next few days, but can still be dissuaded | by solid arguments...

I like the idea :)

scott